Why? Roland. Why? - Rompler Effect Routing Idiocy

[AROIOS]

I believe my Motif XF has yet another way of routing elements - it allows each element to be selectively passed through Insert A, Insert B, both Inserts, or neither (just to the master fx). It does not have individual sends to my knowledge.

 

I had a MOTIF ES and its EFX implementation is similar to the JV/XP/XV/Old-Fantoms. They all have "Insertion FXs" and "System FXs" and the flexibility of "Whether" and "How Much" we send signals through these EFXs are down at the partial/element level.

 

What MOTIF ES (and likely your XF too) had a leg up on the XV/Old-Fantom (technically) was the structure of their Insertion FXs. As you mentioned, MOTIF's insertion FX block had 2 sub-blocks A and B. These are two fully functional and non-interdependent EFX units. And we can route the signal through A and B either in parallel or in series.

 

This matters more in Patch mode coz there's no way we can assign more than 1 Insertion FX to a patch on the XV/Old-Fantom, but MOTIF effectively gives us 2 Insertion FXs for any given patch.

 

In performance mode, that difference matters less coz we can assign up to 3 Insertion FXs to a given part on XV/Fantom.

 

Roland had some interesting designs to deal with that limitation as far back as on the JD synths. They were jamming up to 5 different types of (but simultaneously working) effects into one FX block. Some of these Multi-FXs sounded great, e.g. the "EP Multi", which is a Enhancer+Chorus+Phaser+Tremolo+AutoPanner all-in-one preset.

 

Again, similar to the "idiocy" (purely my personal opinion) that started this thread, it boggles my mind when Roland decided to not implement these JD Multi-FXs on the JV/XP/Old-Fantom synths. The saving grace is that at least they did put them in the XV synths... and... guess what, the lower-end SC series (starting from SC-88Pro), what gives!

 

(Btw, I'm glad no one in this thread so far has jumped out to state the obvious but utterly useless line that "It's the brand's freedom to do whatever they want with their new products." It's so commonly seen on this type of discussions and the initiators never seen to realize that they are not contributing anything intelligent or helpful to the conversation.)